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Okay.

[it's just an acknowledgement that he heard isaac, not a condoning of the situation. his voice stays calm, but isaac can hear when peter starts breathing slowly on purpose, out of time with the acceleration of his pulse, because he's suddenly angry, angry and sick, and that's the right response but it's also not. he stays still until the crest of anger passes, although the sick remains.]

Everybody's a mystery. If they're not, they aren't worth bothering with. And it's not tiptoeing, it's figuring that if I need to know a thing, you'll tell me somehow or other. That's mostly worked so far.

[another pause, and he runs a hand through his hair.]

Unhappy a lot, but not all the time.

Edited 2014-01-26 13:22 (UTC)

[Isaac can feel the emotion roiling from Peter, and his eyes lower for a moment at the realization of it. He's not sure how he feels, to be honest. It's easy to see that Peter is upset with what has happened (maybe not easy, but Isaac knows him and the wolf knows him and that's all he really needs to read him like an open book), but Isaac doesn't really know if he's that upset about it anymore. It happened.

Not all the time. Isaac guiltily remembers the moonbase, the deterioration of his resolve and the sudden, crippling fear that he inherited more from his father than he thought. His jaw draws tight, because Peter didn't know what the problem was then, but acknowledged it and tried to help all the same.

Peter's been more to him than he deserves, really.]

That's not why he's my anchor, [Isaac suddenly feels the need to clarify. His fingers twist at the blankets over his legs.] I use him because it wasn't always like that. Wolves don't feel that- I don't know what you call it. Nostalgia? Bitterness? It's a human thing. Scott has love, Derek has anger, I've- got this, I guess.

[Isaac feels like he's rambling and so he goes quiet, cutting himself short when it seems like there might have been more he was going to say. Peter is too easy to talk to, sometimes.]

[pain makes you human. peter's pretty sure that they've both said it to him before, isaac and scott. but peter's never quite agreed. pain breeds fear, and fear is what makes cornered animals lash out, makes them chew their own legs off to escape a trap. what isaac's talking about is a twisty thing, love and fear and pain wrapped up so tightly and put in a shape labeled father. every time the full moon rises, isaac picks at his own scars, summons up the spectre of a man whose horrors never quite canceled out the memory of his love, now forever unchanging in death.

and it's what keeps isaac human.

peter wants a cigarette. he wants to hug isaac. he wants to throw up, a little bit. he wants his mother, wants her to pet his hair and put an arm around isaac and show him what family can look like.]

It's stronger.

[Isaac picks at the fabric and doesn't know what to say to that. He doesn't know if he's right. He doesn't know if Peter really understands what he's talking about. What he does know is that being trapped in a closet made him almost kill Allison. He knows that being up on the moon base caused him to lash out, hurt people, caused him to call for Jesse's blood and drive forward to an extent that scared even himself.

Isaac isn't sure if what he has can be called control, or if it's just a harder way to chain himself down, but it's something and it works.

It has to. He doesn't have anything else.]

It does the job.

[He swallows hard, before waving a hand, trying to brush it off. When he laughs, there's really no humor to it- just a wry, almost broken sound of someone who can't quite turn this into a joke.] I told you it was complicated.

That's what I mean. Not that it's easy, or all good. Just strong.

[he hasn't seen derek, but he saw first-hand how fragile scott's anchor was.]

Yeah, it's complicated.

[he shifts a little, still not touching isaac, just almost.]

You're strong.

[Isaac smiles a little sadly, glancing back toward Peter as he considers his words. And he can't really deny that he has strength- in his cockier moments, he's prone to boasting about it and making heated threats. Still, Isaac is pretty sure that Peter isn't just talking about battle prowess or anything physical like that, and so he's not quite sure if the other werewolf is really right.]

I'm something. [And then a pause.] I haven't died yet, anyway.

[peter shakes his head, gives one of those little laughs that indicates nothing's funny.]

Don't you dare fucking discount that. You don't even know...just don't, okay?

[it comes out more a plea than he meant it to.]

[Isaac lifts an eyebrow back at him, not entirely sure why that, of all things, causes the emotional reaction.]

It's just a fact. Supernatural beings don't seem to have a great life expectancy where I'm from.

Right. And you're still alive. Don't act like that's nothing. It's not. Not everyone can survive.

Edited 2014-01-26 14:16 (UTC)

[Isaac finds himself flinching at the word, even though he knows that it's true.]

I guess I have to be good at something.

Sorry.

[it's the flinch that makes him finally curl up, knees under his chin. it's an odd look on him, because he's usually quite sprawly, or at least stretched out.]

I just...sorry.

[He realizes his reaction a moment too late and glances back toward Peter, shaking his head.]

Why? You're right.

[he shrugs, and this time it's peter whose eyes cut away from isaac.]

Close to home, I guess.

[There's a pause, and Isaac bites his lip. Oops.]

-your dad?

Nah. I don't know who he is and I don't give a fuck. If he did, he'd have stuck around, right?

[he folds his arms across his knees, sets his chin on them.]

Christina. The vargulf, her name was Christina. She was fourteen. Her grandparents' property backs up to the lot we live on. She wanted to be a writer, so she came nosing around when we moved in. Good material, I guess.

[Isaac isn't exactly sure what this has to do with their conversation, but- well, they don't often get the chance to talk about stuff like this.]

You've told me about her before.

Not all of it. Not the important parts.

She'd come hang around the trailer. Always talking, a hundred questions and ninety of them were why? I'd tell her...whatever I felt like right then. Half bullshit and half truth. It was funny, y'know? She never knew whether I was just fucking with her, but that was half the fun. And one day she asked me, just straight up asked if I was a werewolf, because of my fingers.

[he holds up his hand where isaac can see it, wiggles his index and middle fingers, which are the same length.]

Indicator of lycanthropy, y'see. No idea where the hell she found that out. She'd already decided I was, so I went with it.

[he's quiet a moment.]

There's another way to become a werewolf, besides getting bitten. You can drink from the paw-print of a werewolf. That way they don't even have to know.

...she used you.

[Isaac understands it slowly, his voice coming out like a quiet revelation.]

You didn't even know.

I didn't know. If I'd known, maybe...who the hell knows. Maybe nothing different at all.

She was so smart, though. And such a girl, all caught up in what other people think and trying to be normal. She wanted to be some normal popular girl so bad, when she was like a hundred times more interesting than that. Although I guess that's most people.

[he bites his lip for a moment, and sighs.]

I don't know what went wrong, when she changed. But she told me--when we'd figured it out, when I was going to kill her--she told me she'd never heard her true name. Something just rose up out of her, I guess, made her do what she did. Kill all those girls. Blame it on me.

[Isaac doesn't really know what to say to that, so he just nods, settling his cheek on his knees.]

But you know it wasn't your fault.

Oh, I know.

[he's not just saying that, he does know. to blame himself would be to take the power of choice away from christina. she's the one who bent and sipped muddy water from the place his paw had been, he won't take that from her.]

A vargulf just wants to destroy. Everything. Especially itself. That's what I mean. She had all these things inside her that were fucking great, but the thing that she was the most is the thing that took her. I looked into her eyes, at the end, and there wasn't anything human there anymore. No Christina anymore. Just pain and hate.

Don't think that surviving is nothing, or that holding onto yourself is nothing.

[Isaac has to think about that for a moment, try to see the story through Peter's eyes and then reflect it onto himself. To be honest, there had never been a part where self destruction was an option- it was just live, live another day, another week, try to see the light at the end and survive.

He didn't know for what. Isaac is pretty sure that he still doesn't. But Peter says it's worth it.]

...it's different. [He finally says, a little hoarsely. His fingers twist in the sheets, and he shakes his head.] She had a choice.

To become a werewolf? Yeah, she did. The rest, I don't know. I still don't understand.

[peter has never doubted himself in that way. the vargulf never left tracks, where peter's are clear and deep, because only one of them ever truly believed in themself.]

And you aren't a vargulf, you don't even have them. But you fight to live, not to die. That's the difference.

[Isaac finds himself shaking his head at that, trying to figure out how to form the words.]

No- Derek gave me a choice. Your girl, Christina, she... [he doesn't know how to put this delicately. Isaac doesn't look down on her, of course, he doesn't even know her and he understands Peter's empathy and attachment to her memory. But that doesn't mean he agrees with their situations, with his survival being praised merely because she didn't.]

-survival was an option for her. I don't mean that in a bad way, but saying anything about me because I did doesn't mean anything because I had to. When- [he swallows hard, his jaw tense,] -when you're trapped, the only thing you can bear to think of is getting out. There is no giving up. There's just- taking, enduring, and you don't even know why because you know there's not light at the end, but you can't- you can't stop being.

You say she was creative, smart, but she was trapped by society. [Isaac shrugs.] That was her choice. The bars there weren't real.

I don't disagree with you.

[he's quiet for a moment, thinking.]

I can't pretend I know what your life was like. I only know what mine was. She came over in the first place because oooh, the neighbors are gypsies, how exciting. Getting mobbed on the playground for being a fucking gyppo. I got pretty good at getting beat up, anyway.

She didn't have any of that. She'd never worried about where she was eating or sleeping a goddamn day in her life. A little weird, sure, but nobody ever punched her about it. And still, all that hate and pain.

When you don't know what a real cage is like, those little bars on your window feel like a prison. I think she was trying to survive, she just...went the wrong way, somehow.

Some people can stop being, that's what I mean. Some people do curl up and die, or tear themselves to pieces and die. Some things don't survive in a jar, and some things claw and scrape until they get the top off.